The
Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for HomePico Iyer(Vintage, 303 pages).buy
it

Last
summer, I went to Barcelona to visit some friends. I was met at the Sants
train station by John, a Toronto-born friend who moved to Spain a decade
ago, married a Catalan woman and got a job at the university. “The city’s
changed a bit since you were here two years ago,” he told me as soon as
I arrived. The Spanish government had relaxed immigration restrictions,
he explained, pointing out the other station arrivals: men in flowing djellbas
and colourful soccer shirts, north and West Africans greeting friends and
family all around us. Working class neighbourhoods in the old town were
filling up with halal grocers and Arabic signs. It was looking like couscous
and tagine might join paella and patatas bravas on Barcelona cafe menus.

“Of course,
some older Spanish are upset about it all, naturally,” John said, with
a shrug. “But I like it. It reminds me of what I liked about Toronto.”

It’s a
scene that author Pico Iyer would recognize, and it’s moments like this
-- in airports and hotels, in cities from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, Atlanta
to London, Kyoto to Toronto - that make up his latest book, The Global
Soul, a book he describes as being about “globalism moving inwards”.
Iyer, a Sri Lankan raised in Oxford and Los Angeles who lives in a Japanese
suburb, is probably the archetypical “global soul”, by his own definition,
and his book is a meditation on the new, stateless, transnational world
he inhabits, a world that he feels we are all, to some extent, living in
now, as travel and technology, economics and unstoppable political tides
create a world of mongrel identities and miscegenated mindsets.

In person,
Iyer is charming, a slight, rumpled man whose recognizably English accent
has been mulled by more than just a few million air miles. He gestures
toward a chair in a sunny bay window in the Hart House library, an utterly
anglophilic spot on a campus, in a city, where the totems and myths of
a colonial past have started to seem a bit precious, even exotic. Iyer
loves Toronto, and devotes a chapter to it in his book (“The Multiculture”),
a celebration of a place where “a mongrel, many-headed exile was surrounded
by a mongrel, many-headed city - a community of exiles looking for itself
as he was - and so could find himself central to a city as floating as
he was.”

“I think
a lot of Torontonians are bewildered when someone is so enthusiastic,”
Iyer remarks, “because when you live in a place you’re conscious of all
the things that go wrong. So I know much less about Toronto than any Torontonian,
and there are deficiences that come with that, but I think there are advantages,
too. I’ve seen how multicultures don’t work, in Los Angeles or Hong Kong
or London, so coming here I’m sure there are lots of things of which I’m
not aware, but still it gives me a more positive sense.”

It’s hard
to discount Iyer’s optimism, even as I intend to give him grief about some
factual inaccuracies that, as a nit-picking, defensive Torontonian, I couldn’t
ignore. Illustrating how Toronto has changed from its staid, Anglo-Saxon
roots, Iyer informs the reader that, as he writes, the new Anglican archbishop
of the city is one Aloyzius Ambrozic, a Croatian. Ambrozic is, alas, Toronto’s
Catholic archbishop, and this mistake highlights the proper, British frame
of reference that Iyer, perhaps understandably, brings to his survey of
the global landscape. The Church of England, an undeniable force in Iyer’s
post-colonial upbringing, hasn’t been a force in Toronto for over a century.
It was Nonconformist Protestant businessmen - Presbyterians and Methodists
and Baptists - who built and ruled Toronto for decades, until new immigrants
- and an influx of Catholics from practically every corner of the world
- changed the city yet again. While Iyer gets his particulars wrong, his
point remains valid, as anyone who lives in the city can see.

While Toronto
might be an international, multicultural city, it’s still, in every sense
of the word, a provincial one, insecure and given to meaningless sloganeering
about being “world class” in every way, from its sports facilities to its
restaurants. We are not, and never will be New York or London, but we needn’t
regard our provincialism as a bad thing since, after all, most of the world
is, in essence, provincial.

Iyer, ever
the optimist, seems delighted by my rant about Toronto’s provincialism.
“One of the things that appeals to me about Canada, and Toronto in particular,
is that they can take words that are nasty and pejorative in England and
give them a positive spin. That’s part of what appeals to me about here
is they you can actually give hopefulness to the English sensibility. There
seems to be both a degree of self-consciousness and of imaginative possibility
about how to handle this new notion of an international city that’s taking
place in places like Toronto and Vancouver. I think places like New York
and London, maybe because they’re older and huger, give the impression
of anarchy, that all these different cultures can come but they’re not
going to fundamentally change the city, or if they do, the city’s not going
to acknowledge it. In that sense, maybe not because it’s provincial, but
because it’s smaller, Toronto can actually try and put these pieces together
in a new way.”

At Iyer’s
reading, the day after we talk, author Austin Clark inadvertently underlines
this provincialism by upbraiding Iyer for “a note of colonialism” in his
presentation. Iyer counts writers like Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry,
Nino Ricci, Shyam Selvadurai and Kerri Sakamoto as among Toronto’s great
assets; residents of the city who may or may not set their novels here,
but who nevertheless enhance its collective literary memory.

Clark scoldingly
noted that Iyer didn’t mention poet Dionne Brand nor, it seems, himself,
in either his book or his talk. Iyer might, in fact, be unconsciously guilty
of residual colonial attitudes that might not seem in line with the brave
new world he portrays, but it probably does Clark no great service to treat
a visiting writer with the same pique he might evince in the face of a
rejected grant application. If Pico Iyer is to be believed, we have a greater
opportunity than the maintenance of our cliques and the defense of a spurious
elite. I, for one, would like to think my city is worthy of his optimism